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In the 1990s, researchers injected 34 Black and Brown boys with a banned drug to study their violence risk.

The boys were selected by race by design. White children were explicitly excluded from participation.

The NIMH investigated and found no wrongdoing. Researchers were never sanctioned. Careers flourished.

Training did not teach me this: What's missing from psychiatric training is as important as what's taught.

When I graduated from my child psychiatry fellowship training in 2018, I felt qualified to provide quality mental healthcare to children. I had trained at a nationally recognized program and successfully passed my board certification exam.

And then I learned about the fenfluramine study.

Not during my formal training or as part of board certification prep. I learned about it the way I’ve learned most of what I know about psychiatry’s racist history—on my own, through resources well outside of my profession.

I first saw it referenced in Ibram X. Kendi’s landmark book Stamped from the Beginning, which cited Harriet Washington’s Medical Apartheid, where I read about it in greater depth.

I felt ashamed that as a prescriber of psychotropic medication for children, I had not been required to learn about it, much less take responsibility for it.

In the mid-1990s, child mental health researchers at top New York institutions injected grade-school boys with fenfluramine, also known as the diet drug “fen-fen,” a substance that was later banned by the Food and Drug Administration, due to its links to valvular heart disease and pulmonary hypertension.

The boys were all Black or Hispanic by design: Eligible participants were required to be African American or Hispanic because they were deemed to be at higher risk for developing disruptive behaviors. They fasted for 18 hours and had a catheter in their arm for six hours while being injected with a drug later pulled from the market.

The study explored whether........

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